On the other side of the pond, Camelot Unchained continued its the long trek to beta; this week CSE noted it’s making progress on bots, realm control, animations, quivers, and what looks a bit like guild heraldry to us!

so have to say i was verrrrrry pleased by the sc presentation. the gameplay demo looked realistic for once mostly, the face tech looked very good, and CR actually didn’t give us a stupid ass date for 3.1 for once. there was some big hiccups but overall, i was really super impressed, and made me confident in my earlier overly expensive whaleathon. lol

all in all feeling the high from the presentation even still and looking forward to 3.0, with the finally ffs upfront disclosure that it’s only being held back by delta patcher development.

i really hope what we saw at gamescom with CR straight up saying he’s not going to give a date for 3.1 continues. it was absolutely refreshing for him to say that after so much bullshit with dates on this project over the years.

ah cant remember that cus i was quite drunk that friday night so well actually dont remember a lot of it haha. thatll be good to not give any dates, just an outline of whats planning to come in those updates will be enough

i was drinking but didn’t get proper buzzed until after the stream. i was just at the sweet spot of getting my drink on to impulse purchase that 600i before even tuning in to the stream LOL i hadn’t even seen the commerical just looked the pics on teh store page for it and liked the interiors.

also picked up the nox to put in my cutlass and a connie aquila which didn’t even realize it wasn’t the cheapest one or that it was somehow special until i saw the ship ad video after LOL

we live chatted about the presentation in irc and i think all around we were mostly impressed tho we had some good laughs about th eserver crash as did twitch chat i guess LOL.

anyways really think this is by far their best and most consumer friendly presentation they’ve done. alot of the usual bullshit and fan baiting was removed in favour of a solid show with some much needed honesty and forthcomingness. i wish all their comms were like that presenttion but very unlikely to happen. and if anything it’s s hame they waited until the presentation to tell us some of that stuff that has led to alot of qq over the past some odd weeks.

in particular telling us 3.0 is all ready except for the delta patcher. i think if they had just told us that weeks ago it would’ve saved alot of headaches for everyone involved and spared everyone the mild drama of seeing 3.0 on the floor this week instead of in backer’s hands.

for those of us that play the game the demo was actually the most legit they’ve ever done, and very evidently so.

there was a script a la the old “lets emulate how gamers play in a super awkward way” but it was legit being played and this is shown quite obviously when the game server crashed and they had to speed run back to the crash point in their play script.

3.0 being ready, now that we know what the hold up is (which i wish they would’ve told us this as frankly as they did at gamescom ffs) being the delta patcher, i can see anywhere between now and xmas. otherwise they finally did communicate that the content and game itself was ready, just the delta patcher is holding it up.

honestly you know i am super critical of this game and would not give it passes here.

It was scripted, but in a different way this time, they showed a game in its current state (probably a little bit better, let’s be fair here they were fixing bugs and issues for this presentation the whole week) and the actual gameplay you can expect.

It was scripted in a sense that there was one mission and one way the whole thing is going to go down. When they shot the ship out from the back of the car, I am pretty sure he missed but you know all of the presentation are scripted in that sense so that’s not a fair argument to make.

If you look at CiG progress report with the graph, the dotted line represents average pace the bugs are being squashed at, so if you do some basic maths it works out that it hits zero in February 2018, so it is possible that it going to be delayed till then.

In its current state 3.0 is in pre-alpha, honestly, it feels like they started over if you asked me it’s like they scrapped 2.6 and had to start over because they introduced the planets.

2.6 being a wasted patch is a known quantity for some time now. they forked 3.0 off the 2.5 build and devved 2.6 seperately.we’ve known this for like a year now.

but it’s pretty evident the presentation was a legit build. and this is the first presentation demo i can actually see being recreatable by players as actual gameplay which is part of why i’m so impressed by it.

even tho as pointed out the ttk on those idris’s is way to short and probably tuned for the demo.

I can tell Idris was still in a very rough state, if you just look at the command area and how empty and unfinished it looked compared to the constellation which is down right beautiful inside.

I think there is really only one question with SC and that is how long people are willing to wait for it. I have a feeling they need another 150 mil to get this game to a good state, and another 300m for it to be as big as CR wants it to be. I mean GTA took 265mil to make and over a 1000 people worked on it, and it’s a much smaller game.

GTA5’s total cost was $265mill which includes marketing etc not the amount of money spent actually building the game. GTA5 is only smaller in terms of playable space. yet bigger in other aspects.

its not going cost 300mill to get it as big as CR wants, the reason why theyve spent tons of time making the tools and systems to make it much easier to make stuff going forward which in turn leads to lower costs in the future as less time is spent on doing something

as big as the map is in gta the entire thing is so incredibly dense and detailed.

the lead map dev interviewed about his time on the game when he left rockstar and said he still dreams about parts of the map. literal labour of love.

star citizen will never be on the level of gta5 in that regard. and doesn’t really need to be. i just wish CR/their fans would realize that and stop beating their chests acting like this game will ever be there or even should be there.

Well I don’t know, considering they want a 100 systems with let’s say 8 bodies in each of them to land with at least one location that is personalised and unique to that planet, and the detail they showed in the outpost or city on the moon in the presentation was quite nice and on par with any AAA game, that is an immense amount of work, then you include all the stations, which some of will be unique too. All the ships they have are detailed as hell too.

And then SC, mechanically alone, is much bigger than GTA, just think about all the activities they are promising and how in-depth they are. I’d say this is a much bigger game than GTA, or at least they want it and selling it to be.

eh the POIs on planets have nice detail even if in the stream there was some big polygon rubish piles quite evident and sore thumbish.

but for the most part the vast majority of planet surfaces is empty useless space.

there’s alot of thing about star citizen that they want to do or have tried to do that become evident to me while playing gtao. stuff gtao does much better than star citizen tries to do them (like dynamic avatar animations amongst others) or cig/fans claim SC does for the first time ever in gaming that GTAO has had for years now. and generally works a fair bit better in gta than currently in sc.

it should not be downplayed how big of a game gtao really is. both th eonline and single player. gtao itself literally revolutionizes the themepark mmo with plenty of sandy avenues of play to boot. on top of the fundemental game mechanics that has no peer in any genre (tho some people dislike them i guess which is fair), just the breadth and innovation of the various activities is without equal in gaming let alone int eh wow clone gank box dichotomy of mmo’s. and these are things that star citizen appears to be going more traditional mmo routes with regards tot eh gameplay loop design (stuff like classic cliche quest chain implementation).

star citizen may have bigger maps, but that’s not entirely interesting in itself nor is it unique (and really they are behind the curve vs their competition in getting that out there as well).

and while the ships are pretty, there’s plenty of janky assets even in 3.0 as evident in the presentation, let alone in 2.x now, gettinug close to things they didn’t think people would get close to is pretty funny at time to see these very low fidelity textures and massive polys. and that seems to be staying in their map design in 3.0 if the presentation is any indication ( check back to teh demo presentation when they go inside the wreckage – the rubbish outiside is hilariously low fidelity both texture quality and poly counts).

that tech being third party CIG should’ve licensed it instead of the boondoggle routei they’ve gone with trying to approximate it.

it became very clear to me that CR playing GTA one weekend and decided he wanted that for SC but has gone about it in teh most expensive dev hell way possible and come out with a rather poor approximation of it in the end.

i mean i don’t mind what SC has here in that regard, but it’s afar cry from the quality and just pure fluidity of it in gtao and how well avatars react to every single situation and bit of geoemtry in the map.

I think that is giving GTA:O a lot of credit it doesn’t deserve. I mean, half the fun for me and my friends in GTA is finding all the hilarious ways that we can screw with the absolutely horrible AI. The animations in GTA aren’t bad but frankly, if they were to take the animations from say, Ghost Recon Wildlands and the combat gameplay along with it, GTA would be a FAR better game. When it comes to animations and the combat gameplay, GTA is really kind of minimalist.

eh grw does dynamic animations way better than sc does but no where on the level of gtao. the animation engine gtao uses is without peer really when it comes to the kind of high fidelity fine details that chris roberts has talked about wanting for them in sc.

where as grw is mostly just good enough and doesn’t toot it’s own horn so it’s not really held up to gta in that regard. but probably gets rid of the kind of not so great feeling to some people physics of the movement maybe in favour of a more traditional shooter feeling.